


The Train to Crazy Town

by Silberias



Category: Dexter (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rita doesn't take any shit, Rita lives, because fuck Rita not living
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silberias/pseuds/Silberias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was like being on a train just after the train starts leaving. You know you can't get off but the platform still seems so close. You could if you jumped. You could if you hurt yourself, if you died even. But that's scary, somehow scarier than staying on the train with the other passengers. Even the dark ones.</p><p>Dexter saved Rita, but at the cost of revealing who he truly is to her. Three years on, she reflects at Thanksgiving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Train to Crazy Town

**Author's Note:**

> I spoiled myself with what happens to Rita and can't deal with it even now. So I wrote fic because that's how I cope with media not giving me what I want. So there.

It was like being on a train just after the train starts leaving. You know you can't get off but the platform still seems so close. You could if you jumped. You could if you hurt yourself, if you died even. But that's scary, somehow scarier than staying on the train with the other passengers. Even the dark ones.

Rita thinks about _it_ as she slices the Thanksgiving turkey, the give of meat and the resistance of bone. The way she has to maneuver the knife to pull the bird apart. The way she gives a leg to her son, a leg to her husband. A few slices for herself and Astor, very small ones for Harrison. The gurgling chumpchumpchump of the food in the food processor as she grinds some of it up with green beans and gravy for little Marguerite—Margie.

She can usually keep her mind off of it otherwise.

It’s just certain things that she used to do effortlessly—thoughtlessly—now feel different. Dirty.

Dexter says she makes him feel clean and whole in a way he is afraid to let go of. He says he feels very little, but fear and anger can get through more easily. He was angry with that man who tried to kill her and afraid he could have lost her—and she’d gotten her hands stained in blood as she helped Dexter wrap him up like so many presents to the Miami PD. At the time she had been strangely calm. Her voice was raised a few pitches, her words fluttery, but her hands were steady.

Watching Dexter tie off the last of the bags containing Trinity, she’d felt hatred towards the man who had tried to kill her followed swiftly by hatred of Dexter for bringing her into all of this. He had taken her with him to the marina and bought her coffee for the boat ride. The coffee was still hot when her husband pitched the last of her would-be murderer from the deck. When he turned around he was Dexter Morgan again and she’d burst into horrified tears at what she’d helped him do.

Though they’d washed before going out on the ocean, Dexter had sat with her later in the bath at home as she cried and scrubbed and cried some more. She’d thought she would never feel clean again, even as Dexter took her hands and washed them for her. Gently, meticulously—almost loving.

He still says he doesn’t feel love for her but he cannot stand to see others hurt her.

As she divides this Thanksgiving’s turkey—turkey number one for Margie, number three in this world where she knows she is married to a serial killer, turkey number four for little Harrison having a serial killer for a father—Rita thinks about her life. There is a lot to like about it she has to admit as she watches Astor make her plate perfect. A picture of it could go in a magazine. It reminds Rita of Dexter’s methodical behaviors. Cody teases his little brother, and Harrison smiles widely to Rita and Dexter around a mouthful of green beans. Margie giggles in her highchair and waves her spoon around wildly.

She likes her first Thanksgiving it would seem.

This is also the first Thanksgiving which features Dexter’s sister Deb and her ‘old man’ Frank Lundy. Rita wonders if she has some unconscious tell that lets either cop know that the man sitting next to her, the man who wears her ring and she his, is a serial killer far beyond all others. A serial killer who seems to no longer merely pantomime at living like ‘a normal’ in his words. A serial killer who wanted more of an anchor and a door in than those of his sister.

A serial killer who wanted a family.

She slides her Family Time smile at him as she passes his plate back and he smiles right back at her. Dexter has said, she reflects as she enthusiastically chirps for everyone to dig in, that nearly losing her put it into perspective. She was not a check-in, their—yes, their—children weren’t either. Rita was his safe harbor, concealing depths of water still enough to save him from the hurricane always bearing down on him. Astor and Cody were the bumpers, keeping him from clashing too harshly with the normals.

Harrison and Margie.

The two were the rope that kept him in his harbor near his mooring. He belonged to her because of them, no longer of simple choosing on his part. He belonged to her as much as he belonged to Deb—and out of the two of them, Rita knew what he did. She knew his very darkest secret and what did she do with it?

Certainly not what Deb might have done—Deb would have turned him in, not bought him better carving knives. She hadn’t helped him since the day the man had tried to kill her, of course not. She had helped with that man because it had been personal and she thinks, as she looks over to Dexter’s always sly face, that Dexter understands completely.

She wonders if they two will go to their graves with their, yes she decides that it is theirs not his, secret or if somehow Special Agent and Detective Lundy and Lundy will catch on. If Dexter carves up next year’s bird will Deb notice some flick of his wrist that is telling in the world of cops? Will Frank wonder at and contemplate and eventually figure out how easily Dexter separates limbs from body? She wonders if she will go down as accomplice or if Dexter will take the fall?

The knives are set aside as she muses and she is surprised when he takes her hand and kisses the fingertips.

The look in his eyes reminds her of her children a little. Like she is his world, the only thing keeping him afloat in a sea of confusion. He would do a lot more for her than simply take a fall—and now she’s back to thinking about the gruesome ways he kills and there is an alternate track that runs now too.

A train of thought running to how many people he’s put in the ground over her, and how many he plans to before the end.

All abo—oard.


End file.
